Announcements

"Michael Schröder put some effort into supporting a new way of doing a branch and merge of a package with openSUSE Build Service (OBS). This is a new feature of OBS 1.7 release and is active now on build.opensuse.org by default. This new way is almost the same way as subversion or git are working.

The former branch command created just a “_link” file and stored changes beside in a patch file."

"The openSUSE Forums blew past another milestone on January 5th. More than 40,000 users are now registered on the openSUSE Forums!

The forums are currently at 40,445 users, and growing. Since the last time we posted a milestone link, the forums have not only added thousands of members, but also several language-specific forums in addition to the main English language forums. The openSUSE Forums now host Français (French), Magyar (Hungarian), Pусский (Russian), as well as links to external forums in Deutsch (German) and עִברִית (Hebrew)."

Status Updates

Distribution

"As I said, I want to start 11.3 development "for real". So I put up http://www.suse.de/~coolo/opensuse_11.3/ [1] and updated the roadmap in the wiki. From my point of view the long beta and RC phase paid out, so I would like to continue with that. ..."

Build Service

"Sorry if i missed to inform you since September but i passed a very bad period, (including a breakage of my hand and with my ex-girlfriend), but now i’m definetly better, so here i am to inform you about some wonderful progress. ..."

Wiki / Communication / Events

"After a month off, we’re starting off the 2010 year for the Salt Lake Linux Users Group with a meeting on Hudson, an extensible continuous integration server, presented by Stephen Shaw of Novell. Continuous integration servers are a valuable tool in any shop that develops software. From their site (http://hudson-ci.org/): ..."

Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users

"There are not a lot of free software options for mastering DVDs. One of the more complete solutions is QDVDAuthor, although it still has a number of rough spots. It’s a front-end to a collection of command-line free software tools that do each of the individual steps involved in going from a collection of digital video files, audio files, and images to a DVD with menus. As such, it’s quite complicated, and not as stable as some software. Still, it is a rewarding experience if you stick with it. Here I’m going to walk through creating a DVD for a collection of animated videos by my new favorite free-culture artist, Nina Paley (partly because the CC By-SA 3.0 license eliminates any questions about copying the material here, and partly because they’re pretty cool in themselves)."

"OpenOffice.org 3.x is the leading open-source open software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. You can adjust openoffice to your needs by adding more functionality with the help of extensions. In this article we chosed for you some useful extensions for openoffice with installation guide."

"If you're like me, you don't bother buying a calendar in December because you figure at least three people are going to give you calendars for Christmas.

And then there you are on Christmas night, stuffed with a nice dinner and relaxing in front of the fire and suddenly you realize -- no calendars this year! Oh no! Will you have to break down and ... buy one?

Fear not! If you have a web browser and a printer, it's easy to make nice looking custom calendar pages, with your choice of photos."

For Commandline/Script Newbies

"This is a really cool tip I stumbled onto while working with some of the packages on my team. A couple months back I was editing a spec file and accidentally mistyped the name of the spec file. Much to my surprise most of the file was completely missing. After several :q! I finally realized that vi has a skeleton spec file that gets generated when edit a *.spec file that doesn’t exist yet."

For Developers and Programmers

"The libvirt library is a Linux API over the virtualization capabilities of Linux that supports a variety of hypervisors, including Xen and KVM, as well as QEMU and some virtualization products for other operating systems. This article explores libvirt, its use, and its architecture."

For System Administrators

"This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on OpenSUSE 11.2 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access."

"Recent “zypper update” on November’s openSUSE 11.2 release brought system to the most recent status. Current 2.6.31.8-xen kernel works fine . Seems like a next generation of xenified aka Suse kernels is on the go right now. However, i believe,that vm-install on recently updated 11.2 works same way as before maintenance update."

"I’ve change my blog template and quite satisfied with the combination between Wordpress and a brand new BlogNews themes. BlogNews themes came with fully customization option, with flexible widget on every part of template layout. Wordpress widget give me a simple way to add some content on the selected place."

"I manages various website and some of them are running on Serendipity blog engine or a Digg-looks-alike, Pligg. Both engine use Smarty framework based on PHP code. Although Smarty built from PHP engine, it has different style in code writing than another CMS based on PHP like Wordpress. Smarty using their own tags that will be parsed on their engine, so adding Javascript or PHP code can not be directly written in the related tpl file (an extension for Smarty template)."

"An excellent program for monitoring users and applications is psacct. This program will work in the background of your system recording what all users are doing on your system as well as the resources that are being consumed. I originally started using this program when a client asked for a way to monitor his developers and what they were doing on the servers that they were working on. psacct provided an excellent solution which told not only how long the developers were on the box but what commands they were using and how much of the resources they were using. Another great application for this program is to use it to evaluate the resources that applications are consumed on your server. So for example you could see the total resources consumed by apache, mysql, etc. Whether you are a CentOS Administrator or an Ubuntu Server Administrator or a home user wanting to track activity on your machine, this is a good program to explore."

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

"PdfTk-QGUI (aka SuslicTk) is a GUI for pdftk (you can download pdftk at http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk) With PdfTk-QGUI you can: - combine, split, repair, rebuild , encrypt/decrypt PDF documents. Also you can attach files , unpack files, add background/stamp to PDF document (using pdftk) - do it with the help of a convenient graphical user interface - convert txt and html documents to pdf."

"KMyMoney is the Personal Finance Manager for KDE4. It operates similar to Quicken, supports various account types, categorization of expenses, multiple currencies, online banking support via QIF, OFX and HBCI, budgeting and a rich set of reports."

"I thought it might be nice after the holidays to tell about the status of the Kraft project, the KDE software for people operating a small business. Some nice things happened around it.

The best thing is that an additional developer works on Kraft: After my last status post Thomas Richard (account trichard) contacted me that he is interested, next days I had the first patch in my mailbox and from that point of time on he constantly contributed high quality changes into the Kraft repository."

"At the last minute I'm getting away from the snow and ice to visit Camp KDE in San Diego this weekend. I'll be there waving the openSUSE flag, giving a talk about using the Build Service to package and distribute your KDE applications for many Linux distributions, generally enthusing people about openSUSE and thinking about ways for KDE to be better as distributed. So if you see a guy with an SUSE t-shirt on staggering under a huge pile of DVDs, say hi! I hear San Diego has a very good zoo, perhaps they'll lend me a chameleon for even better recognisability..."

GNOME Project

"I came to realize that the number of gnome-developer-kit users is quite small. However, this doesn't stop me from creating a mailing list for it. So, here it is, gnome-developer-kit-discuss@googlegroups.com, a google group. Feel free to drop any message about the developer kit."

"Last time, we assembled our documentation and installed it for use with monodoc. This is a prerequisite for ASP.NET support (as they both use the same system-wide documentation directory). Once the documentation is installed (assuming a Linux distro or OSX with the relevant command-line tools installed), you can trivially host a web server which will display the documentation: ..."

Planet SUSE

"Recently announced was news that netbook maker MSI and Novell would be working together in addressing a growing demand for Notebooks. The new netbook will be shipped with SUSE Moblin preloaded on a new line of netbooks model MSI U135. This is the first OEM release that will provide Moblin 2.1 on Intel Atom netbooks directly to the customers. Here are some words from people at MSI and Novell: ..."

"All I really need know I learned in kindergarten ... Come on, say you're sorry when you mess things up. Allright, we released a YaST (ncurses) update. It broke ncurses packager in openSUSE 11.1 and 11.2 for everyone. One could still use GUI (qt/gtk) packager or zypper CLI - instead, or to fix things up (e.g. to downgrade), but this is not exactly the thing that boosts user's trust in the distribution, is it? Many thanks to Marcus for prompt response - a new update has been released swiftly and it can be downloaded by now. It was enough to rebuild ncurses packager against updated YaST ncurses UI lib ..."

"If you found a problem in your openSUSE system, and know how to fix it, it is very easy now to contribute the fix back to the project.

For example a user had a problem with a boot script erroneously overwriting a file at each system boot. As he already found out how to fix it, I can demonstrate how easy it is to contribute this fix back to the project, so that every openSUSE user can benefit from it. "

"What do you look for in choosing a Web browser? I have a set of criteria that are important to me, but my criteria for choosing a browser may be quite different than yours, though. I'm interested to know what other people look for in a Web browser, and what features may not be that important."

"Since a few days I trying to build an openSUSE Art-Team. The feeling that such a team make some things better for the openSUSE I have since a long time. We have a mailing list opensuse-artwork, not often action there. We have some pages in the wiki with guidlines for doing artwork for openSUSE, we have an IRC #opensuse-artwork on freenode. I have to say I am logged in on the chan right now and I almost nearly alone there and on the mailinglist the traffic isnt much.

Creating artwork is one of the ways to contribute to openSUSE not to the distributon alone. Henne makes in his answer the point “This is a resource we could greatly use. We frequently need artwork for all kinds of purposes, not only the distribution, and up until now this rests on the shoulders of a few people (namely you, robert, jimmac and garrett). We also have a lot of teams/areas in the project that, uhm how do i say this politely, use artwork of questionable quality.”"

"I’m thinking about a project for a week end. Updating Zimbra Appliance to the latest version seems to be nice but I need a few feedback about the specification of appliance. On previous version, I’m using Zimbra 5.0.18 on openSUSE 11.1 JeOS. It has minimum specification but it works pretty well (please let me know if you’ve failed on installing the Appliance). My colleagues in Indonesia sent me some feedback whether it’s possible or no to add the minimal GUI environment to manage the administration and give some testing."

"Virtual Box seems to have gained great popularity. It's certainly a great performer and regardless of anyone's 'Purist' views, this application deserves credit where due. It's actually the easiest to use of the Virtual Machines, that's my opinion anyway and I'm sticking to it."

On the Web

Announcements

"SAN FRANCISCO, January 14, 2010 – The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced its new Linux Jobs Board is now available on the popular online community destination for all matters Linux, Linux.com: http://jobs.linux.com/.

The JobThread Network, an online recruitment platform, reports that the demand for Linux-related jobs has grown 80 percent since 2005, demonstrating that Linux professionals represent the fastest growing job category in the IT industry. The new Linux.com Jobs Board will provide employers and job seekers with an important online forum in which anyone can find the best and brightest Linux talent or the ideal job opportunity."

Reports

"Amid the pomp and circumstance of tablets and hybrid netbooks from CES 2010, there’s a few notable introductions that slipped under the radar. The HP Mini 5102 — backed by a SUSE Linux option — is one of those devices. Coming soon from HP, the Mini 5102 is shipping with some interesting features. Here’s the deal."

"Chromium OS Zero is released , is what announced today Hexxeh in his blog, The new update comes with many improvements , newer version of ChromiumOS code, Major speed improvements for many users ,reduced Broadcom delay ,new artwork for the boot process ,Full extension support ,reduced download size, clocks in at under 250MB ,Still fits on a 1GB USB drive despite the new features ,beginnings of multi-language input (requires a little terminal work to add your language as there is no UI yet) ,quite a lot more!. Bellow we explain the installation steps on Debial/Ubuntu and via command line, also how to convert the ChromiumOS image to a .vdi format, so you can test it directly in your virtualbox machine."

Reviews and Essays

"Tools such as grep, find and awk have often come to the rescue of gleeful Bash-mongers searching for files buried beneath gigabytes of other items. But when a typical Linux distro takes up a couple of gigs of disk space, it's not hard to imagine that finding your files will only become trickier over time.

Compared with their internet brethren, today's desktop search tools can be used not only to look for the names of files on your disk, but can also perform context-sensitive searches within email archives, images, videos and music. Some tools take it a bit further and even index your browser history and bookmarks. But with so many different tools to choose from, often offering the same or similar features, just which are worth trying?"

"In this first article in a series on the RPM Package Manager, learn how to use RPM not just to install software and attendant files but to package almost anything, from scripts to modify a system to source code to documentation."

"To say there was a lot of Linux news coming out of CES last week was an understatement. As I watched the morning TV shows present their inevitable "look-at-what-the-nerds-have-made-this-year" segments from the CES floor during the event, I had the distinct pleasure of turning to my family many times and proclaiming: "See that? Runs Linux.""

Warning!

"Adobe has released an update for Reader and Acrobat to address multiple vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities affect Adobe Reader 9.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX and Adobe Acrobat 9.2 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial-of-service condition." Here the US-CERT Article.

Localization

openSUSE for your ears

The openSUSE Weekly News are available as Livestream or Podcast in the German Language. You can hear it or download it on http://blog.radiotux.de/podcast .

Feedback / Communicate / Get Involved

Do you have comments on any of the things mentioned in this article? Then head right over to the news.opensuse.org story comment section and let us know! Communicate with or get help from the wider openSUSE community -- via IRC, forums, or mailing lists -- see Communicate.

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